Monday 23 May 2011

Schrödinger's beer

One of the beers I picked up on Saturday was Sharp's Monsieur Rock.

This beer was brewed back in October when Sharp's were still a craft brewery. Since then they've been taken over by the Molson Coors industrial mega brewery. As Sharp's stopped being a craft brewery the moment the money changed hand I wondered what effect it had on the beer?

Like Schrödinger's cat it seem to be in a superposition of states: both craft beer and industrial beer. I was able to observe the beer in the bottle all I wanted but this did nothing to collapse the wave function. So I opened it.

Instantly the beer became one state, but which one? It was very pale, with a delicate hop aroma and an interesting flavour. The pale colour and the saaz hops were saying premium lager but there wasn't any of that unpleasant vegetable taste so it was quite like a golden ale too.

I'd happily drink it again, but I'm not sure I'd buy it again, so I wasn't sure whether this meant it was craft or industrial. Then I remembered that it was an interesting beer, and as this seems to be one of the most important characteristics of a craft beer it could only be in that state. Awesome.

5 comments:

  1. Your mere observation altered the reality of the situation anyway. If someone else collapsed the wave function the result would have been different. Perhaps this is the reason why all beer reviews differ...

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  2. Once the passion is in the beer, it stays in. Otherwise, a "craft" beer sold by corporate whores in supermarkets would be just another unreal "product". Surely.

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  3. Clearly we need to quantum entangle every bottle of each particular batch of beer before it leaves the brewery, so that when one is opened and drunk, the collapse of the waveform means each entangled bottle has exactly the same flavour and aroma as the first one to be opened. Unless you only have ein stein to drink out of.

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  4. Perhaps we need to ask CERN if they'd stick a double IPA in the Large Hadron Collider and see if they could find the elusive crafton particle for us.

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